5 American soldiers once sailed 300 miles on a makeshift boat after their boat was sunk!

During WW2, five Americans ended up in a lifeboat without food, water, oar, or mastsafter their boat was hit. An hours later a keg of water floated by....Then a mast. Then a sail. Later, while making a rudder they found hidden food.

They created the rudder by breaking up an interior compartment of the boat. With their new found food, water, and confidence, they sailed 300 miles to the China coast through a typhoon.

That’s right, one of the people happened to know celestial navigation. They were created at the Chinese shore by friendly natives who fed, clothed, and guided them to the U.S. Airbase for 30 days. They made it home 8 months before the war ended. These are easily one of the easily the luckiest unlucky people in the world.

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Only a handful of people in the world have a condition called 'super memory.'

There are a handful of people that can not only remember where they put their car keys yesterday but where they put their car keys 5 years ago. They have what scientists call a highly superior autobiographical memory, and research has identified that their brains are special.

Researchers the University of California studied 11 people with the condition flagged distinct quirks in 9 structures of their brains. Most of the differences (surprise, surprise) were in areas associated with autobiographical memory. The participants had more robust white matter linking the middle and front parts of their brain compared with a group of control subjects.

So far, only 33 cases of this condition have been confirmed.

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Ben Frankling wanted scientists to work on making farts smell better!

One of our forefathers, Benjamin Franklin, wrote an essay referred to as “Fart Proudly” in 1781 ( I didn’t even know people farted back then) while he was living abroad as United States Ambassador of France. The essay was composed in response to a call for scientific paper from the Royal Academy of Brussels.

Franklin believed that the various scientific societies in Europe were increasingly pretentious and concerned with the impractical. So, Franklin responded with an essay suggesting research and experimentation be done in improving the odor of human flatulence. The essay of submitted but sent as a letter to Richard Price, a Welsh philosopher. To get a whiff of this hilarious correspondence, check out the source.

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A high school girl figured out the formula for how long paper must be to be folded in half 12 times!

Britney Crystal Gallivan is most well known for finding the maximum number of times that things can be folded in half. While she was a junior in high school, Gallivan demonstrated that a single piece of toilet paper 1200m in length can be folded in half twelve times. This went against the popular belief that the maximum number of times any piece of paper could be folded in half was seven.

She tested the foldability of paper of other lengths and used her empirical data to derive an equation that yielded the width of paper necessary to fold a piece of paper of thinkness t any n number of times. She went on to be a keynote speaker for the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics Convention and a 2007 graduate of University of California, Berkley. For her equation, check out the source!

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Shakespeare may have smoked pot!

Some of his metaphors are starting to make a lot more sense now, aren’t they?

The clay pipe fragments from Shakespeare’s Startford-upon-Avon home were inspected by Inspector Tommie van der Merwe of the South African Police Service’s Forensic Laboratory. In them, there were trace amounts of cocaine and myristic acid-a hallucinogentic derived from plants like nutmeg, and cannabis.

Shakespeare may not have been a closeted druggie either. Several of his more personal poems reference drugs. For example, his Sonnet #76 is known as the “noted weed” sonnet. Other historical treasures that may have gotten high at one point or another: George Washington and Queen Victoria.

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